Sitrep: How Aliens: Colonial Marines exposed everything terrible about games

Because I try not to be mean even when someone is being mean to me, let us just say that Aliens: Colonial Marines is somewhat… divisive. In that it has divided the patience of many an expectant fan. You can’t win ‘em all, although some people like it. That is cool for them and their happiness is my happiness.

More people do not, though. Metacritic collate-paints a fairly unflattering picture, and I must admit that after less than ten minutes with it I had the same impulse that I’m sure lots of other peoples did: I just wanted to find Randy Pitchford and ask him why.

What happened? Why are the aliens drunk? Why can I put a silencer on my pulse rifle? Why are the textures from the Jurassic period and why can’t the game recognise a graphics card I’ve had for two-hundred years? Look into my eeeeeyeeee.

ACM is not just a window into the tumultuous juggling act of publishers, studios, big expectations and bigger licenses, but also into the nature of the games press.

Subsequently, a lot of backroom details we’re not ordinarily privvy to started to surface: ACM had been in production at Gearbox for six years, continually pushed back in favour of Borderlands 2 until Sega began to suggest legal action was in order.

There’s a very interesting account of all that on Reddit by an alleged former employee.

Nothing will make a publisher (or anyone) move faster than the law, so Gearbox reportedly outsourced the bulk of the game’s dev-work to Section 8 studio TimeGate in a last-ditch effort to stave off Phoenix Wright.

Sega would go on to contradict Gearbox themselves and deny this, but it’s a spurious denial at best. This is not the handiwork of the men and women who gave us Pandora to play on.

ACM is not just a window into the tumultuous juggling act of publishers, studios, big expectations and bigger licenses, but also into the nature of the games press. This guy has clearly not, in my opinion, actually played the game. That is not an assumption, it is clear and present fact: the vagaries of everything he mentions were all covered to the exact same hollow extent in every bit of preview coverage ever.

I don’t believe he was “paid off” but rather that he banked, like so many of us did, on ACM being a great game and thought yeah, let’s get those clicks early. Beyond unethical, but if he’d been right, no disservice would’ve been rendered (that you knew of).

Unfortunately for him, no one could’ve predicted this, and further to that is the fact nobody has been able to convincingly answer why ACM seemingly got worse during development and not better. This video, hey. You’ve seen it, but it’s still a mind-fry:

Development, press, and also the press as given by the developers themselves has not been spared by ACM. Randy Pitchford has worked as a magician IRL and some are starting to feel he’s still an illusionist over at Gearbox too. It’s true, he talked up some things that were simply not in the game (slashed, so they say) and the demo he flaunted in his pre-show runs at the media (see above) looked a lot more impressive than what hit storefronts. Death threats are taking it a little far. Don’t do that.

I interviewed Randy, in person, prior to the game’s release. He genuinely loves Aliens. He does. He knew more about its intricacies than anyone in that room. Not stuff media training would teach you; stuff a fan from way back would know. He looked like a big sad kid when he told me ACM director Brian Martell got to meet Ridley Scott to talk LV-426 and he didn’t. The passion is there and real, but Pitchford works with what he’s got, like any CEO stretched thin.

The whole thing has shone such a piercing light on just about all sectors of the industry it feels like it might actually have been good for something in that context. Gearbox are still suffering tremendous backlash and no doubt will for some time, but all’s not completely lost for ACM itself – because you know who’s going in to save the marines who went in to save the other marines? You guys are.

Let’s be honest – the chances of making an Aliens game that actually satisfied the fanbase is probably not worth taking the risk. The whole point of the original Alien (and to a lesser extent the sequels) was that the fear of the Aliens was because they were never fully revealed. Now they’ve been so over exposed in movies, games, comics etc that it is impossible to actually scare people with them any more.

I haven’t played ACM but I can’t help thinking that they knew it was a stinker, but pooped it out anyway in the knowledge that a lot of people would preorder on the basis of hype and they could make their money anyway even though they’re burning the fans in the process. Short-term I guess this seemed like good buisness sense but hopefully it will mean people will be a lot more circumspect in commiting cash to any future Gearbox titles until the reviews are out.

This is pretty much the case for everyone in IT. They know what they’re doing. They can do it, but planning is definitely not their forte. They need a strong leader/planner to keep everything on track. The fact that Gearbox had huge distractions from the development of other games has clearly resulted in the neglect of A:CM and it just looks awful. Couldn’t be happier that I didn’t pick this up.

jerichosainte:
As stated in the review the final release was vastly different to what previewed prior to launch. I don’t think it has anything to do with being multi platform.

I seem to recall that this was originally going to be a tense, PC-focused game, more like a squad-based horror game than a straight action shooter. Unfortunately that was in 2006 when the console market was ramping up bigtime.

I can almost imagine the meeting with jerk producers – no, it’s too slow! In this bit, can you add, like, 300 aliens? It’s too easy to die, can you make the aliens slower? The squad stuff is too confusing, get rid of it! We want people to really SEE the aliens, can you make them sort of come around the front and move more slowly towards the player? Etc etc.

Actually, I have to say, I’m really dismayed by this. All the discussion sounded *right*. The demo looked *right*, and even the “rough” edges could easily be defined as pre-release issues.

But this. This. It’s just wrong. It’s a slap in the face of each of the companies involved, the fans and gaming community, something that actually coins the phrase “actually worse than Duke Nukem Forever”.